Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 16, 1993 TAG: 9306160232
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DAVID M. POOLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Donald Campbell, 45, had punched his wife in the jaw, stomped on her face, cracked a potted plant on her head and - only a few weeks earlier - knocked her unconscious in the front yard of their Eastland Road home.
"I was scared and I was tired of bein' chased and beat all them years," Campbell later told police in a taped statement that was played for a Roanoke County jury on Tuesday.
Attorneys who are defending Nancy Lee Campbell on a first-degree murder charge would have a open-and-shut case of justifiable homicide - if not for one disturbing fact.
Donald Campbell was shot from behind. He bled to death when the bullet severed an artery in his leg.
In his opening statement, Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Bill Broadhurst suggested that Nancy Lee Campbell lost any claim to self-defense by shooting her husband as he walked away from her.
Broadhurst told jurors that Campbell had no right to kill her husband in those circumstances, no matter how abusive he may have been.
But defense attorney Charlie Phillips argued that his client fired in self-defense.
Phillips said several witnesses, including Nancy Lee Campbell, will testify today that Donald Campbell came at his wife with a sledgehammer moments before he was shot.
Phillips theorized Campbell turned away at the last instant - thus causing the bullet to strike him in the left buttock - when he realized that his long-suffering wife wasn't going to take it any more.
"What we have," Phillips said, "is a situation where this woman was placed in threat of her life."
Tuesday, the defense called friends and family of Nancy Lee Campbell, who said they had witnessed Donald Campbell beat his wife in drunken rages at various times during their five-year marriage.
A records administrator from Roanoke Memorial Hospital testified that Nancy Lee Campbell had been treated at the emergency room at least seven times since 1987 for injuries reportedly inflicted by her husband.
Officer T.R. Brown of the Roanoke County Police Department testified that he responded to a domestic dispute at the Campbell home on Dec. 4 and found Nancy Lee Campbell unconscious in the front yard.
Brown charged Donald Campbell with assault and battery, but he was killed before he could stand trial.
Several witnesses who were aware of what Nancy Lee Campbell was going through said they never understood why she stayed with a man who made her life hell.
After the shooting, Nancy Campbell told police she was horrified when she saw her husband lying in a pool of blood in their driveway.
"I said, `Please don't let him die,' 'cause I cared so much about him and I always will."
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